Book Description
In this outrageous and deeply serious satire, two star indoor volleyball players juggle unspoken jealousies in their off-court romance ahead of their rival teams’ first rematch in a year
Six is 6’7”, scheming to rejoin the starting lineup, and barely checks her phone. Green is 6’1”, always building her brand, and secretly jealous of her more famous girlfriend. They’re gutsy, gorgeous babes going where no Asian American trans woman has gone before: the men’s pro indoor volleyball league. Six and Green are… hot girls with balls.
In between their rival teams’ away games across the globe, they stay connected on SpaceTime and selflessly broadcast their romance with fans on their weekly Instagraph live show. After a long season, they’ll finally reunite for the championship tournament, the first to accommodate in-person fans since the COVIS pandemic struck the world a year ago. Just as they enter an airtight bro bubble of the world’s best, they’re faced with a public crisis that demands an indisputably humiliating task: make a public statement online.
Can Green stock up enough clout for her post-ball future? Can Six girlboss her team’s seniority politics? Can they both take a timeout to just grieve? Their rabid fans and horny haters await their next move. We’re all just desperate for a whiff of the feminine sweaty energy that makes that ball thwack with such spectacular force.
Praise For This Book
Literary Hub, A Most Anticipated Book of the YearElectric Literature, A Most Anticipated Book of the Year
Debutiful, A Most Anticipated Book of 2025
"The tone is light comedy, but the substance is real enough . . . Class difference is one of the least explored dimensions of trans life. Fortunately, Nguyen doesn’t offer an imaginary resolution to the real contradictions of class. It’s enough to illuminate them." —McKenzie Wark, e-flux
"Terrific and sidesplitting . . . It’s the type of novel that is effortlessly laugh-out-loud funny." —Debutiful
"A joyfully hailed satire." —R.O. Kwon, Electric Literature
"Hot Girls with Balls is an antic drama of fame, envy, and vanity, equal parts kinetic and erotic, and intensely self-aware—like if Challengers included the online discourse about Challengers. More than anything else, it's about the perilous double-bind of visibility: how you need it to have your existence acknowledged, and how it constrains and deforms that same existence. All the ills of the internet are here: the performed vulnerability, the eternal servitude to the peanut gallery, that paranoid feeling of all humanity constantly looking over your shoulder—including a couple of real freaks. Like any good volleyball player, Benedict Nguyễn can truly serve, and knows just when to go in for the kill." —Tony Tulathimutte, author of Rejection
"Hot Girls with Balls is a thrillingly cheeky, tenderly irreverent, seriously funny novel, anchored by a loving duo I couldn’t stop rooting for and featuring a very spicy send-up of the comments section. No one is spared from Benedict Nguyễn’s dishy satire, but with writing this alive, we wouldn't want it any other way." —Chantal V. Johnson, author of Post-Traumatic
"I rarely come across a novel with the style, humor, and vitality of Hot Girls with Balls. It's a rigorous and gutting satire, a courageous social fantasy, a realistic portrait of the hell that is humanity, a deeply felt book about love and competition. Benedict Nguyễn is a star. I love the way she sees the world." —Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
"Hot Girls with Balls is a cheeky and daring presentation of women defining themselves for the love of the game. Nguyễn moves blithely through Six and Green’s ability to balance their own bodily autonomy, the transphobic/fetish gaze, and the love and envy that can exist for these women creating themselves in the gender segregationist world of sports. Dear reader, consider yourself immersed in the world that is Hot Girls with Balls!" —Jasmine Gibson, author of A Beauty Has Come
"Nguyễn serves up sharp, hilarious satire about trans celebrity and the limits and costs of trying to change a world from within it. I’ve never read such an unflinching celebration of the weird, violent poetry of online trans discourse, and was here for Six and Green’s journey—via fierce tournament play, lesbian processing, brand deals and soaring follower counts—somehow to rise above it." —Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun and A/S/L
